No One Looks Up
by Alex Glaven
Summary: And then he found someone who did. The new fic challenge is inside!


All right, it's the next installment in the series of non-romance fic challenges! Navy Blu won the last one, here's the challenge she decided upon!

**No One Looks Up**

By: Akiko

He woke up.

He couldn't open his eyes, and he felt sick and weak.

_What happened?_

And then it came rushing back to him.

_Held down by claws, stinking breath filling his mouth and nose, burning his lungs. Teeth and a large, purple tongue dripping hot saliva onto his skin. And then pain. Fire lancing across his eyes and a scream from somewhere far away._

He must be in one of the Sanctums, then. He needed to know if he was right. Needed to know if the softness beneath him was a bed. His face hurt, his arms hurt. Everything hurt. It took a while, but he managed to lift one hand and bring it to his face. Questing fingers met with delicate feeling gauze. He tugged at it, finally pulling it loose and away from his eyes so he could open them.

The open air felt like agony on his retinas.

He couldn't see.

His eyes were open, his hand met nothing in the air that could have obstructed his vision. There was simply nothing, an impenetrable darkness. Even when his eyes were closed he should have been able to see light filtering through the lids.

Now there was only the darkness.

He started screaming.

* * *

He could feel the soft breeze on his face, and he could smell the cool, salty tang of the ocean that it carried. Could taste it on his tongue.

But he couldn't see the ocean. Oh, he could imagine very well what it would look like. All blue and green, the sun staining the waves gold. He could even invade the minds of his companions and see it through their eyes.

But it wasn't the same.

He still remember the words they had said that day.

"You're blind, Ivan," Felix had finally told him, bluntly, after everyone else had fallen silent. He had known, but hearing it from another's mouth felt like a physical blow. Like he had been condemned. "Picard and Mia did all they could. The Healers did all they could. I'm. . .sorry."

"It'll be okay, Ivan," Sheba had said, her small voice trembling. "You can use my eyes."

"You can use all of our eyes," Garet volunteered all of them, and no one put forth any objections.

So they continued to travel together. Ivan would stand near someone and use their eyes to help him find his way. Depend on their hand to lead him away from obstacles that they didn't see.

He began to notice things, like the fact that no one seemed to really look around at everything. That to Garet nearly everything looked like food. That to Picard almost everything was a painful reminder of the home he could never return to. How Felix's eyesight wasn't perfect.

That no one ever looked up.

And it frustrated him so much. When he had been able to see, the sky was the one thing he liked to see the most. Now he knew no one shared his love for the sky. Not even Sheba.

When he got bored of Picard's melancholy thoughts of home and the horizon he decided to use Kraden's mind to see the ocean.

He had never actually used the old man's sight before. After all, it was starting to leave his feeble grasp, and even the heavy lenses he wore weren't enough to cure that. Kraden was never the one that lead him. The man was too old and frail to be leading a blind boy by the hand halfway across the world. And Ivan was afraid that the psychobabble that must have constantly filled the old scholar's head would drive him insane.

But Ivan was curious, so he used his mind anyway.

But Kraden wasn't looking at the ocean.

He was looking at the sky.

For the first time in felt like forever he was seeing the shapes of the clouds, the shapes of birds flitting across the blue dome. And Kraden's eyesight didn't need to be perfect to see the sky. And his constant babbling was a quiet, liquid murmur in the back of his mind, like a small stream gurgling between the stones. It barely disturbed his surface thoughts of peace and calm.

Ivan smiled to himself for the first time since he had woken up in the Sanctum.

* * *

All right, the challenge is this!

NO romance. Again!

It has to do with an injury of some sort, permanent or not. To sight, hearing/speaking, or hunger. Whichever one you want to pick!

The fic CANNOT center around the muteness of Isaac or Felix. It's been overdone.

Must be a one-shot.

Please put in your summary that the fic is for the contest!

And that's all! Get to writing! I'm excited to see the entrants, this is fun!


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